So when I was specifically asked to take part in a symposium on Barack Obama, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal, I quickly said yes.

I was asked to respond to this question: “Was that an FDR-Sized Stimulus?” Here’s some of what I wrote.

President Obama probably wants to be another FDR, and his policies share an ideological kinship with those that were imposed during the New Deal. But there’s really no comparing the 1930s and today. And that’s a good thing. As explained by Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, President Roosevelt’s policies are increasingly understood to have had a negative impact on the American economy. …what should have been a routine or even serious recession became the Great Depression.

In other words, my assessment is that Obama is a Mini-Me version of FDR, which is a lot better (or, to be more accurate, less worse) than the real thing.

To be sure, Obama wants higher tax rates, and he has expanded government control over the economy. And the main achievement of his first year was the so-called stimulus, which was based on the same Keynesian theory that a nation can become richer by switching money from one pocket to another. …Obama did get his health plan through Congress, but its costs, fortunately, pale in comparison to Social Security and its $30 trillion long-run deficit. And the Dodd-Frank bailout bill is peanuts compared to all the intervention of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In other words, Obama’s policies have nudged the nation in the wrong direction and slowed economic growth. FDR, by contrast, dramatically expanded the burden of government and managed to keep us in a depression for a decade. So thank goodness Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt.

The last sentence of the excerpt is a perfect summary of my remarks. I think Obama’s policies have been bad for the economy, but he has done far less damage than FDR because his policy mistakes have been much smaller.

“Hey, don’t sell me short. Just wait to see how much havoc I can wreak if reelected!”

Moreover, Obama has never proposed anything as crazy as FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights.” As I pointed out in my article, this “would have created a massive entitlement state—putting America on a path to becoming a failed European welfare state a couple of decades before European governments made the same mistake.”

On the other hand, subsequent presidents did create that massive entitlement state and Obama added another straw to the camel’s back with Obamacare.

And he is rigidly opposed to the entitlement reforms that would save America from becoming another Greece.

So maybe I didn’t give him enough credit for being as bad as FDR.

P.S. Here’s some 1930s economic humor, and it still applies today. And I also found this cartoon online.

And here’s a good Mini-Me image involving Jimmy Carter. I wasn’t able to find one of Obama and FDR.

If anybody has the skill to create such an image, please send it my way.

P.P.S. The symposium also features an excellent contribution from Professor Lee Ohanian of UCLA.

And from the left, it’s interesting to see that Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research basically agrees with me.

But only in the sense that he also says Obama is a junior-sized version of FDR. Dean actually thinks Obama should have embraced his inner-FDR and wasted even more money on an even bigger so-called stimulus.

17 Responses

It’s hard to come up with a balanced judgment here.
Obama has not expanded government as much as FDR (yet) but FDR did not drive the US to bankruptcy, which Obama might yet do.
Also, FDR was opposed to public sector unions.
Also, in spite of his early fascist sympathies, FDR wisened up and eventually defeated fascism/nazism.
OTOH he handed over a substantial chunk of Eurasia to Stalin.
(NB: this is barely the beginning of a proper accounting.)

Incidentally, it’s interesting to find the Road to Serfdom thesis in the “plan of action for US” at the bottom left of the cartoon. When and where was the cartoon published?

Don’t count on it. Obama’s vision for our country is the same or worse. Hopefully he can be stopped, but it will take a uniting of Libertarians and Conservatives of both Dems and Reps to stop his plans if he is re-elected. That will be very hard when he tends to do things by “royal edict” instead of through laws.

An incentive that says “Withdraw from contributing to GDP to the point where your reward is less than 90k and someone else will pay for most of yours and your family’s healthcare” is not a straw. It’s a log.

The pernicious effects of these things take a few years to settle in but once I retire on ObamaCare good luck getting me back in the workforce in any significant capacity.

To use the successful “cart analogy cartoon” drawn by Mr. Mitchell’s intern, once people start riding the cart, their legs get weak. After a while, they would not be able to get off and pull even if they wanted to. Then who’s going to be the mean person to throw them off the cart? Some heartless selfish libertarian? To be elected by the cart riders? What a delusion.

Good luck Americans. You are circling the drain. Some think its a free joy ride. Well, maybe for some it is, for a few short years.

FDR operated in an environment where 95% of humanity was hibernating under totalitarianism and America’s margin of advantage to the rest if the world (acquired in the uniquely serendipitous creation of this nation) even after FDR, remained vast. Not so today. The margin of advantage has worn very thin as shown by America having dropped to 18th place in the world economic freedom rank, and four billion people that the arrogant west left for dead are in the process of awakening, while the west is reverting to statism. What will America’s economic freedom ranking be after another four years of Obama? 27th? Nations in this rank cannot stay exceptionally prosperous for long. Momentum from past exceptional ism will soon be expended and the irreversible march towards the world average is already well underway. Plot America’s economic freedom ranking in the past two decades. That is the real hockey stick. Inverted. And the misery of mediocrity will settle in for America well before Al Gore’s descendants see another degree of world temperature rise. By then, Americans will only be minor players on the world stage. Even military might derives from economic might. Economic might of motivated people who are free to explore many unimaginable alternatives free of the shackles of central planning and are able to keep the small fraction of their contribution that their monetary compensation represents.

But no wait! We will copy Europe, introduce eurocratic central planning and European effort-reward curves and with some luck things will work out and we will maintain our six times world average standard of living. What at a joke indeed!

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